Tools

Category: IntelliJ IDEA

In this post I will introduce to you the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, one the the most powerful IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Java development or other languages that run on the JVM such as Groovy and Scala. IntelliJ IDEA comes in two editions, the IntelliJJ IDEA Ultimate Edition and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.

The IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is an open source version of Intelli JDEA. That’s mean you can use it for free. If you works with standard Java, Groovy, Scala or mobile development using Android then the Community Edition can be your choice. If you works with in web or Java EE development then the Ultimate Edition is the way to go.

Here are some features that you will get when using the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition:

An Intelligent code editor that has all the smarts for understanding Java, XML and Groovy code.

On the page you can see two editions, select the Community Edition. The current version available when this post was written is the version 12.1.4. You can also see that the download are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For this post I will download the Windows version. The download size for the Windows installer is around 130MB.

Other things you can do next is to learn more about the menu and the keyboard shortcuts that you can use while working with the IDE. One good place is to look at the Help, Tip of the Day menu. You might also want to read the following cheat sheet from the DZone Refcardz, IntelliJ IDEA Cheat Sheet.

That’s finishes our introduction to the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition IDE. I hope you can continue your learning and this IDE will surely help you to understand Java better. Because it is not just a tool to write code, it will give you a lot of suggestion so that you can always improve your code quality.